When I first started, I never considered either. I was a mage type all the way. When I had trouble with leveling BLM on my first character, I mucked around with a bunch of different jobs early on, mostly melee. Eventually I settled on WAR unsure of what to procede to afterwards. I quit and swore that if I ever came back I'd be a tarutaru dark knight.

I can't say that I was interested in becoming a dark knight because it looks dark and mysterious, or that it deals some massive damage. Rather, it had to do with the fact that I thought playing a tarutaru melee of any sort would be fun as hell. I chose DRK simply because it made use of my tarutaru's stats better than any other tarutaru melee would. More specifically, I could actually use my massive INT and larger MP pool. I quit at level 40 when the accuracy craze was really raging and people were starting to tell me I had to get sniper's rings.

Recently I'd been wondering what job I was going to take up after RDM, and ever since the new patch and the addition of Absorb-TP, I became interested in DRK again. I really enjoyed being a melee that could not only cast spells, but also deal good damage. I liked being able to actually use the absorb- spells. I've noticed that other DRKs simply don't because they don't have the MP for it. I've seen DRKs that don't cast magic at all, which seemed like a horrible waste to me. While the damage wasn't absolutely huge, I was also able to burst on my own skillchains, which was really quite fun. I even kept up with good equipment, so I was outdamaging most other melees I encountered anyway. I wasn't really surprised by the rampant mediocracy of the majority of melee players.